Two weeks ago, we were telling you that the fallback mode will be dropped from GNOME 3.8 and that some extensions which provide a GNOME 2 like layout might be maintained by the GNOME developers for those who are used to the classic interface.

Well, it's now official: a few GNOME Shell extensions which bring back some "classic" features will be supported by GNOME. Among the extensions included are: classic alt tab, task bar, min/max buttons and a main menu.

Sure, there are a lot of extensions that can already mimic the classic/fallback session on extensions.gnome.org, but for each GNOME Shell release, the users have to wait for the developers to update them, and sometimes this takes a long time, so it's not a real solution for those who want to always use a GNOME2-like UI.

But because these extensions are supported by the GNOME developers, it means they will work with each new GNOME Shell version, as soon as its released.

A final decision on how the users will be able to use these extensions hasn't been made yet, but one of the ideas so far is to add a "classic mode" switch in GNOME Tweak Tool.

Note: the screenshot in this post does not represent any of the new extensions, it's an old GNOME 3.0 image with some extensions.